Moving In

Moving In

On the neighborhood screen, click the “Move Family In” button to select from the families in the “barracks,” those without homes. Notice the amount of money they have to start, as well as the difficulty level. This level is based upon the combination of the Sims’ traits in the family. For example, having a Neat/Good and a Slob/Evil in the same family will jack up the difficulty.

Choose your family, then click any purple house icon to select that as a possible house. All houses can be bought furnished or unfurnished, though of course the furnished ones will be more expensive. The Schultzes have decided to buy the Shotgun Style house: they can buy it furnished, and the lot has enough room for expansion when it’s time to expand.

Once the house is bought, the purple icon turns green. You’re not immediately thrown into the lot, unlike Sims 2. This way, you can move in a bunch of families at once if you have made them. For now, I want to just enter the game, so I’m clicking the check button to enter the lot.

Once the game loads, it will automatically enter a tutorial to teach you how to get around. We won’t bother repeating the step-by-step instructions here, but we may wind up repeating some of the information in the tutorial as the walkthrough commences.

All right, so the Schultzes are in their house, and they’re ready to live! As the player, our job is to make sure their lives go according to our wishes. The first step to doing that is to understand the interface and being able to read the myriad of bars and numbers so we know, at a moment’s glance, what is going in our little Sims’ minds.